Happy Birthday, Mr. Roth

Philip Roth, who celebrates his 80th birthday today, was first published in The New Yorker the issue of March 14, 1959, with his story, “Defender of the Faith” causing an immediate stir (see the upcoming PBS American Masters profile “Philip Roth: Unmasked”  for, among so many other things,  Mr. Roth’s recollection of buying, opening up, reading and rereading his story

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Steinberg reviewed by Maslin, Mankoff, and Dumas; from the Ink Spill archive “On a Bench with Steinberg”

  Janet Maslin (no relation) reviews Deirdre Bair’s  Saul Steinberg: A Biography  in today’s New York Times: “No Reading Between the Lines”   In his weekly blog post, The New Yorker’s Cartoon Editor, Bob Mankoff looks at and shows us some of Steinberg’s work: “Saul Steinberg, Gag Man”   A New Yorker cartoonist, Jerry Dumas, writing for the Greenwich Time, December

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